What Are Peptides

Peptides as ingredients in skin care products have become increasingly important and popular, especially in products that treat lines and wrinkles, and even more recently, hyper pigmentation and brown spots. Okay, but what are peptides? Very simply, peptides are short or tiny proteins. Proteins are made of long, long chains or strings or amino acids; let me show you what I mean. This chain has about 35 or 40 links. Think of each of these links as an amino acid, and most proteins are long, long chains of amino acids - ten thousand, a hundred thousand, even a million links long. What happens if it’s a very short protein? Just five links or maybe just ten links? That’s what peptides are. And traditionally we’ve always thought of peptides as just being the building blocks of big proteins; the structural building blocks. But what we’ve learned recently is that peptides can act as messengers. That means they go around the body and tell cells either do something or don’t do something. So a peptide that goes to a fibroblast can tell that fibroblast, “make more collagen,” and if it makes more collagen, that’s how we help to fight lines and wrinkles. An example of a peptide like that is palmitoyl pentapeptide, and palmitoyl pentapeptide is found in both Strivectin and Regenerist. Besides those peptides, we’ve also learned that there are peptides that can talk to melanocytes which are the cells that make brown pigmentation and tell those cells, stop making that pigmentation. That’s what helps to fight brown spots and hyper pigmentation. So increasingly, there’s this vast array of peptides in skin care products and they can help those skin care products give you more beautiful skin and make your skin better.

Peptides are one of the more important advances in skincare technology in the recent past, but there's a lot of confusion as to what peptides are. In this episode of DermTV, Dr. Schultz answers the question, "What are peptides?" And also discusses how they help to improve your skin.